Al-Jallad. 2017. Graeco-Arabica I: the southern Levant

2014

Religion is alive and well all over the world, especially in times of personal, political, and social crisis. Even in Europe, long regarded the most “secular” continent, religion has taken centre stage in how people respond to the crises associated with modernity, or how they interact with the nation-state. In this book, scholars working in and on Europe offer fresh perspectives on how religion provides answers to existential crisis, how crisis increases the salience of religious identities and cultural polarization, and how religion is contributing to changes in the modern world in Europe and beyond. Cases from Poland to Pakistan and from Ireland to Zimbabwe, among others, demonstrate the complexity and ambivalence of religion’s role in the contemporary world.

Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2018

Although the Syrian uprising seemed poised initially to proceed along a similar path as revolutions in other parts of the Arab world, the situation quickly devolved into one of the bloodiest and most destructive conflicts since World War II. Against the backdrop of nearly unprecedented devastation and harsh repression, a popular ‘arts of self-satire’ has flourished, creating a form of visual critique directed simultaneously at the regime and the self. Such works appear on the surface to be deeply cynical but in fact serve as a means of visual and social empowerment. This article argues that self-satire—and the ‘involvement’ it reveals, exposes and puts on display—creates a distinctly Syrian form of popular artistic production whose goal is to create a sense of agency as well as to provoke intra-communal and public empathy with the suffering of the Syrian people. In Syria, the arts of the uprising thus are often darkly cynical and self-mocking, but that very self-satire becomes the means by which Syrians insist to themselves, and the world, that their circumstances must be revealed, witnessed and radically identified with.

2014

in Gladys Ganiel, Heidemarie Winkel and Christophe Monnot (eds), Religion in Times of Crisis, p. 153-171., 2014

Intellectual History of the Islamicate World, 2014

This article (re-)introduces Risālat al-Bayān al-aẓhar, a short and by all appearances unfinished treatise by the Coptic scholar al-Rashīd Abū ’l-Khayr Ibn al-Ṭayyib (d. after 1270), to exemplify the pivotal role played by the works of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī during the ‘Renaissance’ of Copto-Arabic literature in the 13th and 14th centuries. Rāzī’s œuvre left its mark on both content and form of systematic religious thought in Eastern Christianity. Whilst the Risāla is available in a partial edition since 1938, it has never been studied so far. As we shall see, Ibn al-Ṭayyib’s critique of Rāzī’s deterministic concept of human agency as outlined in the Muḥaṣṣal came in an attempt to counteract what he perceived as a detrimental effect of the mounting popularity which Rāzī’s works enjoyed among contemporaneous Christian readers. The critique is based on a rich patchwork of sources that is characteristic of 13th century Copto-Arabic encyclopaedism.